Chapter 2
Two
The thing about text messages was that you had no idea whether the recipient had read them. The little Delivered sat there, giving absolutely nothing away, leaving you to wonder: Had they not seen the message, or had your words been read and deemed unworthy of a response?
Livvie had sent her text to Nate Rivers six hours ago. Since then, nothing. Nil. Nada. Despite staring at her phone as though willpower alone would generate a response.
“You’re going to burn a hole through that screen.” Meg reached across Livvie’s tiny coffee table and flipped the phone face down. “Also, you’ve checked it eleven times in the last four minutes. Yes, I counted.”
Livvie flipped it back over. “What if he responds while it’s face down and I miss—”
“The notification sound? That thing that exists specifically so you don’t have to stare at your phone?”
“What if I have it on silent?”
“Do you?”
Livvie checked. She did not.
“That’s what I thought.” Meg tucked her legs underneath her on Livvie’s secondhand couch—the one that had looked charming in the thrift store and revealed itself to be approximately as comfortable as a park bench within a week of purchase.
She wore a pair of yoga pants and a red Ohio State Buckeyes sweatshirt (which Livvie, being a Minnesota Gopher, would forgive her for) and swirled her cabernet, the picture of calm, while Livvie’s nervous system staged a full revolt somewhere in her chest cavity.
This was why Meg was her person. They’d met five years ago at a publishing conference—two of the only women under thirty not schmoozing with senior editors or collecting business cards like Pokémon.
Meg had been hiding in the corner with a plate of cheese cubes, muttering about how her marketing department kept asking her to “make books go viral” as if virality were something you could order on Prime.
Livvie had laughed so hard she’d snorted rosé.
They’d been friends ever since. Meg worked at Starlight Publishing, in marketing, which meant she understood the industry well enough to sympathize but wasn’t close enough to Pemberton to be a conflict of interest. She was also the only person Livvie had told about the meeting.
Well. Parts of the meeting.
“Okay.” Meg set down her wine with the air of someone preparing for a serious conversation. “Walk me through it again. You stood up in a room full of people and said ‘I know him.’ And then what happened?”
Livvie groaned, dropping her head against the back of the couch.
The ceiling of her studio apartment was cracked in the corner.
She should probably call her landlord, but she didn’t like to make waves.
Add it to the list of things she should probably do something about, right after “develop a spine” and “stop making career decisions based on unrequited love for unavailable men.”
“Nothing. Richard told me to text him. So I did.”
Meg cocked her head.
“Okay, fine. Then, after I’d texted, Richard tracked me down and asked me how I knew him. I said my aunt knew Nate, that she was the one who encouraged him to submit his first manuscript. That I’ve read all his books. That I understand what he’s going through.”
“Do you? Understand what he’s going through?”
“His sister was one of my best friends, so yeah, a little. And they wrote the books together, so…yes, I understand how devastated he is.”
Meg’s eyebrows lifted. “Together? The bio just says Ian Rivers.”
“Emma and Nate—EN, which they made into Ian, their pen name. They shared it.” Livvie pushed herself up, restless, and crossed to the window.
Her view was a brick wall and a fire escape, but at least the light was nice this time of day.
Golden. Forgiving. “Emma was the story crafter—she came up with the plots, the worlds, the characters. Nate was the wordsmith. He made it all beautiful. But without her…”
“He can’t write.”
“He hasn’t finished anything since she died.” Livvie pressed her forehead against the cool glass. “And everyone at that meeting talked about him like he…well, they just don’t know what he’s lost.”
A pause. Then, carefully: “But you do. Know him.”
Livvie’s stomach did something complicated. A twist and a drop, like missing a step on a staircase.
“Emma and I were the same age. She and I used to spend summers at my aunt’s place—Aunt Lila lives on Maple Lake, next door to their place.”
“Wait.” Meg sat up straighter. “You spent summers with this guy? Like, plural summers? And you’re only mentioning this now?”
“I spent summers with Emma. Nate was older than me—he wasn’t around much until that last summer…” Livvie turned, shook her head. “We only spent time together because of Emma.”
Could Meg see the lie on her face? She looked away, just in case.
“Uh-huh.” Meg’s voice had shifted into her marketing-person tone—the one that meant she was about to dig for the real story beneath the press release. So apparently, the answer to the aforementioned question was a brutal yes.
“And this older brother who was around. Was he cute?”
“That’s not the—”
“Was he?”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Livvie. Was Nate Rivers, bestselling fantasy author and current bane of your professional existence, cute?”
And of course, Livvie’s eyes drifted, traitorously, to the bookshelf across the room.
The Thornwood Chronicles lived on the top shelf—all four hardcovers, spines cracked from rereading, margins full of notes.
She kept them high because she was tired of explaining them to dates. Tired of the questions.
Meg followed her gaze. Then, with the predatory instinct of someone who spent her days figuring out how to sell things to people, she was off the couch and crossing the room before Livvie could stop her.
“Don’t—”
Too late. Meg had The Court of Thorns in her hands, flipping it over to examine the back jacket. The author photos. One of Emma.
One of Nate.
The photo that Livvie had studied more times than she’d ever admit.
Dark curly hair, the kind that looked like he’d been running his hands through it—which, knowing Nate, he probably had.
It fell across his forehead in a way that made you want to push it back.
A few days’ worth of stubble shadowed his jaw, softening what would otherwise be sharp angles.
He was leaning against a wooden doorframe, wearing a charcoal Henley with the top buttons undone, looking at the camera like it had interrupted something important and he was deciding whether to be annoyed about it.
But it was his eyes that got you. Hazel, maybe, or brown depending on the light—the photo made it hard to tell.
They held something heavy. Something that said I’ve seen things I don’t talk about and I’d rather be anywhere else and, underneath all of it, a flicker of warmth he probably didn’t know was visible.
The kind of eyes that made you want to ask questions. The kind that made you forget you’d asked them when he looked at you.
“Oh.” Meg blinked at the photo. Then blinked again. “Oh, Livvie.”
“It’s not—”
“This man looks like he was engineered in a lab to be the brooding love interest in a movie where the heroine fixes him with the power of her kindness and maybe some aggressive baked goods.” Meg tilted the book, examining it from another angle as if that might make him less devastating.
It did not. “Like someone took ‘mysterious writer in a cabin’ and gave it cheekbones and that mouth and—” She looked up, eyes sharp.
“And you knew him? You spent summers with this face?”
“With his sister. I spent summers with his sister, who was my summertime bestie, who—” Livvie’s voice cracked, just slightly. “Who died. Three years ago. I went to the funeral.”
Meg’s expression softened. She set the book down carefully. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“No, it’s fine. I just…” Livvie returned to the couch, sinking into its uncomfortable depths, pulling a pillow into her lap like a shield.
“I haven’t really talked about this. Any of it.
And now Richard has given me two weeks to get Nate to turn in a manuscript he’s been avoiding for three years, and if I fail, I’m fired, and he won’t answer my text—”
“Wait—what? You left out that part.”
Oops. “Um. So yes, after I told him how I knew him, he sort of gave me the ultimatum.”
“How generous of him.”
“I think it’s his way of figuring out how to tighten their belts. There’s office talk about a merger, downsizing—”
“Do they even know how much business you bring in? You landed a NYT bestseller—”
“I’m just an assistant. I didn’t land anything. Yet.” She reached for her phone. Meg intercepted her hand.
“Nope. New rule. Every time you check that phone, you have to tell me one thing about your history with the hot grieving author.”
“That’s—”
“Fair. That’s completely fair. You’ve been holding out on me.” Meg reclaimed her wine glass and fixed Livvie with a look that said I have nowhere to be and all the patience in the world. “So. Start talking. You said there was one summer. Tell me about the one summer.”
Livvie closed her eyes. Behind them, images flickered like an old film reel: the lake at sunset, the dock with two Adirondack chairs, the firepit surrounded by blue camp chairs.
Emma’s laugh. Nate’s voice, reading aloud from whatever book he was studying that week.
The smell of woodsmoke and pine needles and possibility.
“Okay, well, mostly I saw him from a distance. I was sixteen the first summer,” she said slowly.
“Emma had just turned sixteen too—our birthdays were three weeks apart. We were obsessed with the same books, the same movies, the same everything. Aunt Lila kept saying we were like the same person in two bodies.”
“And Nate?”